Nancheng, a new first-tier city by the river, is a place where prosperity and darkness coexist. Over the past three months, the city has been rocked by a series of “trace-free vigilante murders.”
The first three victims and the twelve who followed were all hypocrites who had operated in the gray areas of the law. They were suspected of commercial fraud, bullying and assault, dereliction of duty and breaking the law, domestic violence and child abuse, or misappropriating charitable funds. Their crimes were proven, yet a lack of evidence, protection from powerful connections, and statutes of limitations had allowed them to escape punishment and continue living in the public eye as if nothing were wrong.
The crime scenes were eerily clean. There were no fingerprints, footprints, surveillance footage, or traces of a murder weapon. Every police investigation had reached a dead end.
Just as the criminal investigation team was at a loss and the cases were about to go cold, brilliant detective Xiong Shou stepped in of his own accord. Working with the police as a private investigator, he found crucial leads with uncanny precision, closing in step by step on the “phantom killer.” Time and again, he overturned the police’s mistaken deductions and solved one case after another, becoming the talk of the city.
Everyone thought Xiong Shou was hunting a deranged killer who lurked in the shadows and took the law into his own hands.
Until the end, when every planted clue was accounted for and the shocking truth came to light:
From the first murder to the last, every clue, every trap, and every foolproof scheme to escape justice had been devised by Xiong Shou. He had never been hunting the killer. He was hunting his prey: every criminal who had slipped through the net of the law. And he himself was the only killer who hunted sinners.
It's an okay novel so far.